The Magazine

VentureCat 2018: The Results

It’s officially a wrap on VentureCat 2018, Northwestern’s annual student startup competition. We had a full day of pitches from 29 of Northwestern’s best and brightest student founders from across the entire university. Semifinalist teams represented almost every school at Northwestern and consisted of both graduate and undergraduate students.

Six teams took the finals stage in White Auditorium at the Kellogg Global Hub on May 23 to pitch to an audience of hundreds, including a panel of esteemed judges. Students pitching had seven minutes to make their case, followed by five minutes of Q&A with the judges.

VentureCat is a collaborative effort, not only in planning, but also in a diverse set of startup teams. To ensure there’s room for everyone, VentureCat has six industry tracks that students startups compete within at the semifinals.

Business to Business

Business to Consumer

Energy and Sustainability

Food and Beverage

Life Sciences and Medical Innovation

Social Impact and Nonprofit

The 29 semifinalists teams this year were nothing short of impressive and included members of The Garage family like PedalCell, BrewBike, BOSSY, Facilikey, Unruled. and many many more. The Kellogg School of Management was also well represented with teams like reBLEND, 2nd Kitchen, LineShift and Commit turning out for the semifinals. Overall, semifinalists teams consisted of student entrepreneurs from Kellogg, Medill, Weinberg, the School of Communications, the Pritzker School of Law, McCormick, and SESP.

After semifinals pitches took place behind closed doors, first and second place in each track were awarded non-dilutive prize money. First place in each track took home $5,000 and second place in each track took home $3,000.

After a (very short) break for the teams, the first place winner from each track took the finals stage to pitch. All of the pitches were super impressive, and as each VentureCat year passes, it’s obvious that the bar continues to be raised by Northwestern students.

During the judges’ deliberation, for the first time ever, we asked the VentureCat audience who their favorite was! Hundreds of text votes were tallied by our team, and Rhaeos took home the audience vote prize of $1,000.

Then, we hauled out some very big checks (even taller than our MC, Melissa Kaufman, Executive Director of The Garage) for the top three pitches of the night. Third place, and an additional $10,000 was awarded to Rhaeos, a Life Sciences and Medical Innovations startup that has developed a noninvasive, wearable biosensor capable of diagnosing ventricular shunt malfunction.

Second place, and $15,000, went to Business to Consumer competitor BrewBike: BrewBike fuels college students with cold brew coffee.

And first place, and the grand prize of $30,000 went to NUMiX Materials, an Energy and Sustainability startup that manufactures and supplies Northwestern University-patented materials to remove heavy metals from aqueous streams at ten times the efficiency of competing materials on a per-volume basis. You can learn more about NUMiX and their mission on Northwestern’s ISEN website here.

Thank you to all of the VentureCat sponsors, including both general and track sponsors. Without your help and support, we wouldn’t have the ability to help Northwestern founders turn their ideas into reality. You mean the world to us.

Steve Szaronos and Rishi Prabhu founded Bespoke Post in 2011 after being accepted into the Entrepreneur’s Roundtable Accelerator program and seeing an opportunity in the e-commerce market for a subscription service for men. Since raising $25,000 in seed funding, Bespoke Post has grown to become the leading lifestyle subscription and e-commerce service for men, delivering monthly “boxes of awesome” filled with quality products, like home bar essentials and shaving sets, to more than 100,000 subscribers in the U.S. and Canada. They most recently raised $8 million in funding in a Series A, and have built out a team of more than 40 employees headquartered in New York City.

Sarah Adler and Mackenzie Barth (both listed in Forbes 2018 30 Under 30) were juniors at Northwestern when they decided to start their own website combining their passion for journalism and food. Spoon University, a website to share recipes, stories, trends, and other food-related content launched in 2012 and grew to a 100-person student team at Northwestern’s campus within a year. Now, Spoon University has expanded into 250 universities with over 7,000 contributors. In May 2016, Scripps Networks Interactive acquired the company at a valuation of $11 million.

Sonali Lamba and Nicole Staple met their first year at Kellogg in 2010, and incorporated Brideside in 2012 with a major launch in 2014. Brideside reinvented wedding retail by providing an all-channel concierge service experience that eases the bridal party planning process. Their dedicated style consultants work closely with brides and bridesmaids to curate their vision from a collection of affordable and on-trend bridesmaid dresses and gifts. Their showrooms, digital tools and try at home program make it easy for bridal parties to coordinate, no matter where they live. Realizing Chicago has the largest wedding market by spend, Brideside opened their first brick-and-mortar in the Fulton River District. Since 2015, the company has raised $6.5M in funding and has launched four additional showroom locations. Brideside’s newest flagship location will open in NYC in November 2018.

Sam Shank founded HotelTonight, the on-demand hotel booking app, in 2011, which now has more than 30 millions downloads. Operating exclusively through mobile bookings, HotelTonight is the leading mobile app for hotel bookings last minute and beyond, ensuring there’s always a quality hotel room at the lowest possible rate in 1,700 cities and nearly 40 countries.

Standing in line with her husband at Chipotle one day in 2011, Elise Wetzel surveyed the fresh ingredients on the menu and the customized approach to each meal. And then she asked herself: Why couldn’t that same approach work for pizza? Elise is the co-founder of Blaze Pizza, a nationwide fast-casual pizza restaurant that has grown in popularity. The Northwestern alumna founded the chain in 2011 with her husband, Rick Wetzel, who co-founded Wetzel’s Pretzels. In the five years since, the company has added more than 200 restaurants across North America, captured A-list investors such as LeBron James and Maria Shriver, and secured brand-building partnerships with Project(RED), and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. With annual sales now approaching $300 million, Wetzel believes Blaze will become a $1 billion brand by 2022.